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Beyond piano, Glenn Gould’s prize legacy: Littler

The Glenn Gould Prize is awarded not for piano playing but for a major contribution toward improving the human condition through music and communication.

Glenn Gould, whose statue sits outside the CBC's Front St. W. headquarters, has become much more famous in death than he had been in life, remembered in 50 or so books in a dozen languages, a dozen feature films, three plays and a flock of musical tributes.

Just in case you haven’t forgiven Alan Rickman for trying to knock off Bruce Willis in that blockbuster film Die Hard, let it be said that villains can change. The Golden Globe-winning actor has gone over to the light side, joining the six member jury for next year’s awarding of the 10th Glenn Gould Prize.

Together with Oscar-nominated screenwriter and director Deepa Mehta, Montreux Jazz Festival founder Claude Nobs, Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Patti Smith, superstar opera tenor Rolando Villazon and businessman-philanthropist David Tang, Rickman will choose the $50,000 winner of what has been dubbed the Nobel Prize of the Arts.

The prize was established by the Glenn Gould Foundation, itself founded in 1983 by friends and colleagues to pay tribute to the late Toronto pianist and broadcaster and preserve his legacy.

Gould himself had taken no steps to establish such a foundation. When he died in 1982 at the shockingly early age of 50, his will, to the surprise of the musical public, left the bulk of his estate to the Salvation Army and the SPCA.

What neither he nor his immediate circle of friends and acquaintances realized at the time was that he would soon become much more famous in death than he had been in life.

Brian Levine, current executive director of the Glenn Gould Foundation, numbers 50 or so books in a dozen languages, a dozen feature films, three plays and a flock of musical tributes as evidence to support his own belief that, perhaps save for Dr. Norman Bethune and his veneration by 1.3 billion Chinese, Toronto’s favourite musical son has arguably become the most famous Canadian of all time.

His admirers have ranged from the astronomer Carl Sagan, who saw to it that one of his recordings would circle indefinitely over the Earth in the Voyager spacecraft, to the cannibalistic (and fictional) Dr. Hannibal Lecter of Silence of the Lambs film fame, to the late computer whiz Steve Jobs, who reportedly loved comparing Gould’s different recorded versions of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. He is even a principal character in the German writer Joachim Berendt’s novel The Loser.

It was in recognition of the extraordinary range of Gould’s influence that the foundation decided to establish a prize not for piano playing but for a major contribution toward improving the human condition through music and communication.

During my year on the jury (2005), we awarded the prize to the American André Previn, a multi-faceted pianist, conductor, composer and educator, as much at home in the worlds of jazz and film as in the concert hall and opera house. The first winner, in 1987, was the innovative composer R. Murray Schafer, and the most recent, last year, poet-songwriter-performer Leonard Cohen.

Between those two Canadians have come such distinguished world figures as superstar cellist Yo-Yo Ma, violinist-conductor Yehudi Menuhin and composer-conductor Pierre Boulez. And the range of countries represented by the winners has extended from France to Japan to Venezuela.

Indeed, it was its presentation in 2009 to Venezuela’s José Antonio Abreu, founder of his country’s revolutionary music education program, El Sistema, that gave the now biennial award its highest profile yet, thanks to the participation in a week of Toronto activities of the El Sistema-trained Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra and its charismatic, Abreu-coached conductor, Gustavo Dudamel.

Each prize winner is invited to choose the winner of a $15,000 protégé prize, awarded by the city of Toronto, and Abreu chose Dudamel, just as he was achieving international celebrity as the newly appointed music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Anyone can actually nominate a candidate for the main prize, and the foundation invites nominees from a broad range of fields, including musical creation or performance, film, video, television, radio, recording, music theatre and writing. The nominee need not even be a musician.

Music nevertheless remains the language championed by the prize, which made Abreu’s choice such an important one, with tangible Canadian consequences. For it was hearing a string quartet of players from the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra at a Rosedale house concert during the orchestra’s week in Ontario’s capital city that inspired Toronto philanthropist Robert Eisenberg to fund the establishment of a Toronto centre of El Sistema. Other centres are spreading across the country.

As for the Venezuelan consequences of the Glenn Gould Prize, the foundation partnered with Yamaha to turn the $50,000 award into $150,000 worth of instruments for Abreu’s young musicians. Leonard Cohen subsequently turned his award into a $50,000 gift to the Canada Council for the Arts.

Over the years the foundation has sponsored conferences, issued a newsletter and participated in various educational projects. Now it is looking to internationalize, having established an American counterpart (in part for tax benefits) with such gilt-edged figures as architect Frank Gehry on its board, and within Canada to seek its first federal government support in decades.

‘‘Gould’s mind was a brilliant and shimmering prism through which sounds, sense and ideas were magically transformed,’’ Yo-Yo Ma has observed. And the Glenn Gould Foundation continues the work of keeping that prism before the public.

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